Pacific Basin Shipping Limited of Hong Kong launched a new web site on 14 July 2004, the same day of PacBasin’s public listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Navarik’s creative team built the standards-based website in just two weeks. The site will be the foundation for a larger corporate, client, and investor intranet that will be rolled out over the next year and integrated into various new operational systems being developed by the company.

“A decade or two ago, no one got fired for hiring McKinsey or IBM. Now, bigger is not necessarily better,” says Jess Scheer, executive editor at Kennedy Information, in a Computerworld article about outsourcing work to boutique software companies. “Many small firms are agile, and because they have a lighter management process, that can make the project go faster,” says Jason Glazier, chief technology and e-commerce officer at Lincoln Financial Group.

Web browsers and other Internet applications use digital certificates to verify the identities of people and organizations conducting transactions online. Until recently, obtaining such certficates could be expensive. An organization called CAcert hopes to change that by providing free certificates instead.

“Fujitsu this week announced an expanded collaboration with Microsoft on servers for mainframe computing, but the Japanese hardware giant is also investing in open source, paving the way for a handful of new PostgreSQL functions that will benefit all of the open source database’s users.” (Navarik’s web applications use PostgreSQL.)